Eurostar-Crossed Travelers Plot New Routes

LONDON -- Stranded passengers at Eurostar's St. Pancras international train station in London have gone from feeling hopeless and angry to just looking at ways to get home.

Kostas Danas, a 28-year-old university lecturer who is relocating to Paris from Cambridge, decided to book a flight to get to Thessaloniki, Greece.

Eurostar Breakdown

Passengers waited with their luggage as further disruption affected the Eurostar service at St. Pancras station in London. Leon Neal /AFP/Getty Images

On Saturday, he was supposed to travel to Paris, where he would then take a flight to his native Greece to spend Christmas with his family and then fly back to start his new job in France.

"I feel stuck here. I had to take decisions quickly. After they said on Sunday at 8 p.m. that there were not going to be any trains [Monday], I decided to book a flight," Mr. Danas said. He estimates the total cost of missing his Eurostar train will be around £300 ($485).

"Eurostar will compensate for any hotel or transport expenses but I'm staying at a friend's house," he said. "They are not going to compensate for all the hassle, though."

Other passengers who have been coming back since Saturday agreed there has been conflicting information.

"This is the first and the last time I am using Eurostar," said a passenger going to Brussels. "I will go back to my organization in Brussels and will advise our travel agent not to send my colleagues via the Eurostar to London," he added.

Andrea Murcia, a 30-year-old French-Colombian who works in the hotel and tourism industry in Paris, came with her husband for a brief weekend and said the trip has turned into a nasty experience.

Ms. Murcia says Eurostar staff told her and her husband on Saturday that the company will only reimburse them for one night and not for meals or transportation. But they were later told they could expense accommodation and expenses for the last couple of days.

"We haven't kept any receipts because they told us initially they wouldn't be paying for us," she said. "We are still hopeful that we can get a train [Tuesday] so we can make it in time for our flight to Colombia which leaves on Christmas Eve. We have been waiting to go there for three years."

The couple explored the option of getting a bus from Victoria Station in London to Paris or Brussels, but they were told there are no seats available until Dec. 26.

Another route the couple and many others are considering is taking the train from King's Cross to Dover, England; the ferry from Dover to Calais, France; and then a train from Calais to Paris. The trip takes about 10 hours. "We have the option to go to Calais but we are not sure if we are going to find any trains from there to Calais. I'm tired of eating only fast food here," she said.

At South Station in Brussels, the Eurostar waiting room was almost empty Monday afternoon, after hundreds of passengers were turned back this weekend, and sent to hotels throughout the city.

Eurostar employee Nejib Ben Abid handed out croissants and coffee. Eurostar officials told him to set up the stand on Monday morning. They were a bit late: The pile of croissants went mostly uneaten. "It's very quiet compared to the weekend," said Mr. Ben Abid. "Kind of nice."

He and his colleagues told travelers that there might be a train Tuesday or Wednesday.

Two Chinese women students living in London said they would wait for the next train no matter how long it took.

"We're not sure the bus and ferry are safe," said Yingzhi Xu. "We are getting tired of visiting the same places in Brussels over and over again," said Yu Pei, her friend. "We wonder if we [will] get back in time for Christmas."

David Low, a 26-year-old engineer from Scotland, was supposed to take the 6:57 p.m. train to London from Brussels on Sunday. Arriving on Sunday, he was told to spend the night at the Congress Hotel in Brussels.

The hotel was full of weary Eurostar travelers, he said. At breakfast, they traded exit strategies.

"The ones who could afford it were getting expensive flights out of town," he said. "Nobody knows how long it will be before the next train."

A receptionist at the Congress said the hotel hosted about a dozen Eurostar passengers this weekend -- that was all it had room for -- whose rooms had been paid for by Eurostar.

Mr. Low tried to get Eurostar to pay for a trip to Paris so he could wait there, where he has friends and family, for the next train. Eurostar refused, he said, so he planned to get a bus to Calais, a ferry to Dover and then a train to London, paid for by Eurostar. Total time: around eight hours.

Mr. Low was philosophical. "The safest plane is one that doesn't take off," he said, quoting a professor in an avionics course he says he once took.

All three passengers said Eurostar's handling of the situation had been professional, though not exceptional.

Marie Hugon, a 30-year-old lawyer who works in Brussels, waited for a Thalys train back to her native Paris. It was delayed more than two hours.

"It's warmer in the Eurostar waiting room," she said.

A spokesman for the Belgian Ministry of Transport said the Belgian government would look into conducting an investigation, "but the breakdown didn't happen on Belgian soil, so it will probably be [the] French and English governments who will investigate."

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